Ever so often we can hear people talking about NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens and, from Beeple to Tyler Hobbs & Art Blocks, many artists have put their unique digital works at auction and sold them for very large sums of money.
It’s a trend already beyond the boundaries of art in the strictest sense of the word. This is the case of Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, who sold the token of his first tweet published on the social network back on 21 March 2006 for $2.9 million - approximately €2.47 million - or the source code of the World Wide Web, created by inventor Tim Berners-Lee and auctioned last June for approximately €4.6 million.
However, as of today, the world's most expensive NFT artwork is still Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5,000 Days: a collage consisting of 5,000 images measuring 21,069 x 21,069 pixels and bought at Christie's for over $69.3 million by a Singapore-based programmer.
On the other hand, there are artists such as John Watkinson and Matt Hall of the American studio Larva Labs, who thought of developing an algorithm that automatically generated 10,000 pixel-style portraits that were later made known and put up for sale under the name of CryptoPunks: in this case, VNM USA carried out an analysis of the "Top 100 NFT Sales" ranking by NFT QT, highlighting that almost half - 43% - of the non-fungible tokens present in the ranking - as well as the most expensive - are the result of their own creative minds. The highest-priced piece is CryptoPunk #7523, which depicts a face with a protective mask and cap, purchased for over $11.75 million.